Archives

Welcome back to George vs the Listener Crossword, the internet’s third favorite Listener blog. Which for some bizarre reason had something on the order of 50 views on Thursday. Probably the Listener Editor team looking for lawsuit material.

Anyhoo, what have we this week three weeks ago? We have Gos! Now Gos has a kind of a noir theme to most puzzles, with a series of murder mystery themes which have been rather fun so I’m looking forward to this.

Hmmm… a black spot in the middle, normal clues, looks like everything is a real word except for some unclued answers… one of which would have been 1 across so that’s a deft sidestep of the 1 across test. There is a 8 across, and it looks like A,M(ATE)UR so there goes my test, but I guess someone over at another blog will be happy with the appearance of booze in the first clue. Anyhoo, we are away.

There were no tricks in the clues, though it seemed the solve worked in an L-shaped sweep, starting from AMATEUR and working down and across to where it became apparent that ORSON WELLES was a good guess for the right hand column (on the grid below, rather than writing the letter straight in to that column, I wrote it to the right of the column in case the change was obvious.

So ORSON WELLES, eh? What do we have up the top… if it’s JOSEPH COTTON we are in “Citizen Kane” territory. And so it is! Yes, we’re hunting Rosebud and I’ve got to change ORSON WELLES to CITIZEN KANE or CHARLES KANE and JOSEPH COTTON to the name of whatever his character was… wikioolgle time. Jedidiah Leland. Ummm… that’s not going to fit. J. Leland? Jed Leland?

Besides, putting CITIZEN KANE on the right doesn’t make real words.

Hmmm…

Yes, dear readers, I plugged along with the CITIZEN KANE thing for about an hour, wondering how it could work. Kind of like watching the film for the first time.

Reset… definitely ORSON WELLES and JOSEPH COTTON. Did they work together again after “Citizen Kane”? Of course they did… a few other times, but it appears the next time they were on screen together was THE THIRD MAN.

D’OH!

HOLLY MARTINS and THE THIRD MAN give us all real words and they were searching for HARRY LIME

Stop kicking yourself, George, stop kicking yourself.

Well done, Gos – though I got there in the end I managed to pursue a false trail that would make any mystery writer proud. I believe I can call that one a Victory to George

2014 tally: 29-0-5

Feel free to tell me I need to watch more movies and see you next week when Charybdis nets us a book agreement.